


everything is fine in heaven (but i'll never get to know)

by Anonymous



Series: a feeling's not a thing you own [16]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Body Horror, Body Image, Depression, Eating Disorders, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:28:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22120309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Patton is dead. Roman is bad.Where does that leave Remus?
Relationships: ???, Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders & Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders, Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders/Thomas Sanders, Deceit Sanders & Thomas Sanders
Series: a feeling's not a thing you own [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1453462
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29
Collections: anonymous





	everything is fine in heaven (but i'll never get to know)

**Author's Note:**

> happy new year!!! i am on the maximum normal dose of fluoxetine (prozac) now so i'm doing great!!!!!! i hope that this sarcasm is very clear!!! (except for happy new year; i really hope you all have a great year. unfortunately things happen)
> 
> but, yeah. more meds, weight gain bc food is nice and happy at christmas and then you feel your thighs closer than they were before and you can't stand to shower because you might be a few kilos heavier but you're a coward and you hate yourself, let's get this shitparty ventfic started!!!
> 
> content warnings, my friends!!!: eating disorders and references to bingeing (and failed purging), obviously. referenced past character death, obviously. references to the other issues thomas has in this series. suicidal thoughts, and other issues written during a Metaphor Infodump. graphic meat-eating. remus-typical body horror. feeling like you're faking your mental illness, from the perspective of the person feeling like they're faking their mental illness. possibly disparaging talk and unconscious bias of women having more eating disorders/severity thereof, and weight gain in general. also, remus engages in stuff with thomas that's further than he's gone in previous vents of mine, so. uh. cinematic parallels with the first fic?

“You’re worthless,” Roman tells Thomas.

He doesn’t _want_ to say it. He doesn’t want to _think_ it. But he _does_ think it, so he says it.

He understands Remus better now. In all honesty, he didn’t have a choice about that. It’s not as if he could have opted out of the pain that came from having your skull shattered open, and words spilling out just like your brains are, and then, having your brother hold you, and the awkward angles of his broken neck. Roman had let himself melt into Remus in some irrational form of what was either despair or hope.

Then he was Roman-Remus- _Roman_ , and despair and hope both were the same thing; they always were! Two sides of the same coin, with neither side being tails. Roman’s mind was still his own, but it was also Remus’s, and Remus’s mind was also Roman’s, until he realised that they couldn’t find the split between them anymore.

Only, Roman thinks, his mind was more rotten than his brother’s at that point. The water – the only thing Roman would consume – would find its way from their body when Remus cried. He could understand why, and he hated it.

“I’m sorry,” says Roman. He pokes at the bedsheet near his foot, where he sits with his legs crossed. “I didn’t mean that.”

Thomas looks back at him, heavy-eyed even though his year’s been pretty great, so far. Nothing to really complain about, except the constant thoughts of self-harm and suicide, and those are pretty normal, by now.

Roman will never tell Thomas to kill himself again.

“He did,” says Remus.

“I did,” Roman amends. “I did mean it, and I’m sorry that I meant it.”

Remus breathes more heavily into their shared lungs, now. Roman doesn’t express his gratitude for that, because that would acknowledge how his own windpipe is deteriorating.

“This is good,” says Ethan, helping Thomas from the bed that he’d only returned to last night. “This means that all parts of yourself acknowledge your thoughts of self-doubt as something untrue.”

“Something he _wants_ to be untrue,” Remus interrupts. “Doesn’t mean it’s not.”

Thomas hums as Ethan leads him to the bathroom for a shower. “I agree with Remus.”

Roman feels his left shoulder, which belongs to Remus, now, because Roman chose that, slump. His heart feels light, like a balloon filled with air, or a stomach filled with nothing at all.

When they hear the water run from the shower, over Thomas’s body, Remus speaks, so softly that he almost blends in with that sound.

“He agrees with me.”

Roman nods. He runs a hand through his hair as he does, and hopes that Remus doesn’t register the fact that he needed to do that in order to keep his neck upright.

Remus is looking at him, but it’s with a pleading gaze, with his eyes the size of headlights. Well, that’s an exaggeration. If Remus’s eyes were as big as headlights, either his skull or his eyeballs would explode, and it would be very gory. Remus does not look repulsive – at least, not in that way.

“That’s a good thing, right?” asks Remus, his wet voice quivering.

“I think so,” says Roman.

If he had said the opposite of that, it would have been just as true. His answer was simply a whim.

Remus shakes his head, scratching along the left side of his face with enough force that it almost registers in Roman’s mind.

He says, sounding just as fragile as before, “But what if it’s not? I’m the bad one, bro. I can’t be… I don’t know! I can’t be _good_ ; not like you.”

Roman looks down at his hand. Once, this hand helped him to cradle Thomas, as he slowly slipped into a slumber he shouldn’t have woken from, while Roman himself sang whatever lullaby he could catch the melody of. This hand has clawed at Thomas’s flesh, with only the intent to cause pain. This hand fruitlessly pressed down in a struggling Side or Centre’s mouth, desperately trying to activate a gag reflex that wasn’t really there.

He can still remember the smell of saliva, mixed with the aftertaste of food that reeks in their breath. He doesn’t want to hate them. He wants to feel guilt for all of the bullshit he’s put them through.

“I’m not good,” Roman murmurs. “Remus, you tried to kill me in _self-defence_ , because _I_ was trying to kill you. You’re not the bad one.”

“But _you_ can’t be the bad one!” argues Remus. “You’re… You’re…”

“I’m bad,” Roman smiles, as if forcing his lips to curve upwards would make it so that the words wouldn’t hurt Remus. Roman isn’t worried about the words hurting himself. He’s empty, like he was always going to be. “I’m a bad… I’m a bad Side, Remus.”

Remus’s fingers move from scratching his side of the body, to tearing at Roman’s shoulder and where his collarbone used to stick out.

He shouts, “ _Stop lying_!”

The sound of water isn’t drowned out by the volume of his voice, because it has stopped altogether.

Roman rolls his eyes. Why does he have to be attached to his dumbass of a brother?

Oh, yeah. Because of _that_.

Thomas, clutching a towel over his shoulders and around his body, hurries into his bedroom, as Ethan rises from the bathroom tiles behind him.

“Is everything okay?” he asks.

Roman thinks that he can hear his Centre’s heart pounding in his heavy chest. He thinks he can feel it echoing in his own shared ribcage; a tongue-twisting iambic pentameter of concern.

He says, “Everything’s fine.”

If he had said the opposite of that, it would have been just as true.

* * *

There’s a familiarity to the routine, now. Virgil points out every reason why Thomas shouldn’t eat, and Logan counters all of them with health facts, and Thomas leaves the kitchen so he can have whatever meal he’s having in peace.

It’s not even that Virgil doesn’t want Thomas to eat; he really does. Thing is, it’s just kind of difficult to let his guard down around food, when it’s the cause of all of this bullshit. If Thomas didn’t eat in order to control his feelings (or lack thereof), he wouldn’t have gotten so fat. But now he’s fat, and nobody will take him seriously anymore.

Not like anyone took him seriously in the first place.

Thomas doesn’t talk about the eating disorder as much, when they meet Dr. Faber. He’ll talk about how often he looked at the kitchen knives in his parents’ house, and about all of the things he wanted to do with them, and the intrusive thoughts that he didn’t want to act on. He’ll talk about his past, or Patton, or anything he can think of, but he won’t talk about the eating disorder.

Turns out, Deceit’s not the only one who can make someone shut up.

It’s not out of cruelty, or even a fully conscious thing. Dr. Faber will ask something like-

“How has your food intake been?”

_“I ate an apple after breakfast. It hurt my teeth because I forgot to brush them for a couple of days, and then I brushed them extra-hard last night, but then Logan told me that doing that can wear away the enamel and actually be worse for your teeth,”_ Thomas could say.

_“I’ve been forcing myself to eat two-hundred calories for every meal. If I eat more than that, I’ll feel guilty. It doesn’t matter, though, because it only takes a few days at most for me to end up bingeing and going back to my normal eating habits,”_ Roman might confess.

_“I don’t know how to eat food without overthinking every mouthful. My appetite is either endless or non-existent. I wish I didn’t have tastebuds, or a tongue, or a stomach, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore,”_ Virgil thinks.

And Thomas always says, “It’s been fine,” instead of any of that, and Virgil is grateful.

If he was ever honest, would they make him do inpatient? Waste space in a hospital with obese women and skeletal teens? Or would he be passed over, because he _would_ be a waste of space, because all of those people have real problems.

Thomas isn’t like _them_. He doesn’t have any real problems. He’s fairly wealthy, and loved by his family and friends, and liked by his fans to a mildly obsessive degree. And he loves all of them back! He’s got everything that he could want. He’s a cis white man, so it’s not like he’s hurting for acceptance. Virgil’s just throwing a fit for attention, probably. Telling Thomas that he has to take his medication, and telling Thomas that he can't even drink a glass of wine to celebrate making it through the year. It's not like he actually needs this, anyway.

And then he remembers Patton, because Patton was the core Side of their Centre. He was joy, and sadness, and anger – righteous or not. He was the part of Thomas that Thomas treasured the most, and followed the most, even when it didn’t seem like it, and now he’s dead.

Like, they’ve got Hope, now, but Hope’s kind of a disaster. He scampers around like a bipedal puppy, telling everyone about his amazing ideas, or making simple observations like a kindergartener playing ‘I Spy’. He doesn’t shoulder the burden of right and wrong, and he doesn’t cry on the sofa in the dark of the early morning because he can’t handle the stress. Honestly, Virgil thinks, he’s barely a Side. A poor replacement for Patton.

Patton, who is dead.

It could be Virgil’s fault. Virgil’s difficult to deal with. The things that calm him are depressing or boring. He needs a lot of attention, and pulls it away from the other Sides.

He’s doing that with Thomas, now. Sure, yeah, he’s just a part of Thomas’s whole self, but he’s the part that doesn’t…

He’s the Side that’s a self-centred jerk. Everything’s about him. Friends; therapy; medication; it’s all to keep him happy and controllable. And what does he do? He stops Thomas from using therapy to its full effectiveness.

He doesn’t know if it’s new to him, this thought. It doesn’t make him startle, or anything, so it can’t be _that_ intrusive, right?

It’s just that, for a moment, Virgil wonders if ducking out would be the right thing to do.

* * *

When Remus says, “You should eat,” it’s more out of obligation than anything. A performance for politeness’s sake.

That’s because, the same as always, Roman will reply with, “I can’t.”

He doesn’t apologise. Remus doesn’t expect him to. He’s not lying, and, if he is, it doesn’t matter. Remus eats enough for the two of them.

The succulence of meat torn between his teeth; of fat roasted until it melts into the muscles of dead animals, ripped from their bones and packaged for easy consumption by the lower and middle class of America. Remus lives for it. Roman looks away, and sips on a glass of water.

Potatoes. Properly roasted, with crispy skins and fluffy insides. Sure, they’ve been in tupperware for a bit too long, as in, like, Christmas, so Thomas isn’t going to eat them. Down the hatch they go.

Remus picks off the scab in the middle of his chest. You know, from the baby arm he ate. He eats the scab, too, and lets it bleed in weak trickles of red.

At night, when everyone else is trying to sleep, Remus rises up in Thomas’s room. Obviously, Roman’s with him, because they have the same body now. They’ve had the same body for a while.

He – they both – lays in Thomas’s bed, on his – their – side. Roman shoves a pillow between their faces, so Remus has something to rest his head on, if he wants.

Remus traces his fingers along the side of Thomas’s body, ghostlike enough to cause shivers, and kisses the nape of his Centre’s neck. He swirls his tongue a little, and exhales on the damp patch he’s left. Does it feel nice? He hopes it does.

“Do you want this?” Remus asks, to be polite more than anything.

Thomas nods his head along the pillow, and Remus lets his mouth construct the best fantasy he’s done in years.

After Thomas falls into a sticky sleep, Remus wonders what the feeling in his chest is.

“You’re happy,” Roman tells him in a gentle murmur. “You’re proud, because Thomas thinks you’ve done well, and his opinion is the one that matters most.”

Thomas’s happiness feels like what Remus is pretty sure, but don’t quote him on that, is contentedness. It’s warm, and secure, even though it feels like there’s butterflies in his chest. When they enter the corner of Thomas’s mind that feels like old walled gardens with little protective hedgerows between the pathways and the plants, and rose bushes growing over black iron trellises like blooming bridges, Remus double-checks that no butterflies have entered his body.

Roman chokes at that. Literally, he coughs for a moment, and then starts gasping for breath through his withering trachea, and since his trachea is withering, it doesn’t really do much, does it?

It doesn’t.

So Remus is trying to heal up the gashes in their shared lungs, which contain no butterflies, or moths, or even just little flies. No caterpillars in his capillaries, or larvae nestled in the gaps of his ribcage. His hand slides along, covered in blood as he traces the gashes and tells himself that it will help.

As soon as his lungs have started to accept air again, he breathes in. Big, gasping gulps of air, begging for a second more of life. Fast exhalations, because he needs more oxygen, and he needs it fast.

Not the only thing he needs fast-

_Stop it!_

He breathes for himself, sure, but he’s mostly breathing for Roman. Roman, who gets so silent, and who says whatever he’s thinking, but only at the worst possible moments. Roman, who was always meant to be the good twin; the good Creativity.

His eyes flicker around at the flowers. Roses, in every colour of the rainbow. All of them are dulled by the grey, sunless sky. Some clouds are a slightly lighter shade of grey – that’s not a book he needs to think about right now! Purple and white hyacinths – Remus thinks that’s what they are, anyway – all twisted up with rhododendrons of fuchsia. Is it true that fuchsia doesn’t actually exist? That’s it’s just a trick of the human mind, to create something that isn’t there, just to make it make sense?

Marigolds grow in the rotting remnants of daffodils, or are they narcissus? The petals are too damaged to tell. Either way, the marigolds blossom and bloom, in yellow-orange-red, like crumpled paper pompoms, all on little sticks.

_“You’re alright,”_ Remus tries to say, but it comes out as gasps between his breaths, which keep heaving, in, out, in, out, until Roman’s face has returned to its normal state of paleness.

“You’re alright,” he says. “You’re alright.”

Roman’s fingers are splayed across his cheek, and the ball of his palm is pressed against his jaw. He tilts his head to look at Remus. His eyes are red and watery, and a little bit of dribbling snot falls from his nose.

He has not been crying.

“I’m really not, Remus,” he tells him, with a voice as gentle and measured as a voice can be, directly after almost suffocating. “None of us are.”

“You’re alright with me,” Remus says. He wraps his arm around his body, to grip Roman’s shoulder with what’s hopefully a comforting amount of firmness.

The top of Roman’s head leans against Remus’s cheek. His hair is limp and greasy, even more than Remus’s, and it’s not for a lack of cleaning. It’s just that it’s like that, now.

Lots of things are like this, now.

Remus walks the two of them through the garden for a while. Past the marigolds, and under the rosy rainbow trellis. Past the rhododendrons, and the hyacinths, and some pink plants with petals like rabbit ears or fairy wings, torn away from their tiny owners, which Roman calls _‘cyclamens’_ , or something. Roman tears dying blossoms off of a plant that looks a little like orange blossom.

“It’s philadelphus,” Roman tells him.

“Like Philadelphia?” asks Remus, grinning bitterly. “Greek in origin, means ‘brotherly love’?”

“It’s not like that,” says Roman. His glare is undermined by the fact that he then leaves those flowers well alone.

They wander past lavender, and Roman yawns. They walk past white lilies, and Roman’s gaze lingers on them. They reach a bush of forget-me-nots, and Roman reaches out to cradle some of the blue blossoms in his fingers.

They both sink out, and rise up in the round stone room that belongs to them both.

It’s not tastefully decorated, because it’s barely decorated at all. There’s a deep beech frame on the wall, containing pressed and preserved flowers. Naked Man Orchids, to be precise. They look like little people, with two dark dots for eyes, and a dick that dangles past their knees. Of course, they’re just petals.

There’s plenty of books on their bookshelves, with some of Remus’s weightier toys acting as bookends, which he only got to do after disinfecting them thoroughly. It’s worth it, though, just to have a dildo that Bad Dragon would blush at, making sure that the collection of Pokémon fanfiction doesn’t slip and cause a mini book-avalanche.

Their television, as wide as Thomas is tall, is hidden against the wall by a set of red velvet theatre curtains, but Remus isn’t really feeling like watching a tragedy tonight. He just wants to sleep in their Alaskan King poster bed, with the curtains pulled tightly shut, so he can’t see the things outside that he fears.

Nothing in particular, of course. Just the lack of Roman.

For now, though, he lets himself drift off to sleep, his head balanced with Roman’s on a fluffy pillow, and occasionally glancing to his right so he can be sure that he’s not alone in his body.

He’s not.

He’s alright


End file.
